


Red Sky at Morning

by Hippediva



Category: Sweeney Todd (2007), Sweeney Todd - Sondheim/Wheeler
Genre: Other, hawk from a handsaw madness challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-22
Updated: 2010-03-22
Packaged: 2017-10-08 05:22:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/73127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hippediva/pseuds/Hippediva
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Takes place after the Act I curtain. My thanks to <a href="http://smtfhw.livejournal.com/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://smtfhw.livejournal.com/"><b>smtfhw</b></a> for her swift and deadly beta.  For the <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/hawkfromhandsaw/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://community.livejournal.com/hawkfromhandsaw/"><b>hawkfromhandsaw</b></a> madness challenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Sky at Morning

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**Current mood:** |   
calm  
---|---  
**Entry tags:** |  [fiction](http://hippediva.livejournal.com/tag/fiction)  
  
_**FIC: Red Sky at Morning**_  
Title: Red Sky at Morning  
Author: [](http://hippediva.livejournal.com/profile)[**hippediva**](http://hippediva.livejournal.com/)  
Fandom and characters: Sweeney Todd; Todd, Mrs. Lovett  
Rating: R  
Prompt:  
"The body's delicate: the tempest in my mind  
Doth from my senses take all feeling else  
Save what beats there."  
-King Lear, Act III Scene iv

Summary: Takes place after the Act I curtain. My thanks to [](http://smtfhw.livejournal.com/profile)[**smtfhw**](http://smtfhw.livejournal.com/) for her swift and deadly beta. For the [](http://community.livejournal.com/hawkfromhandsaw/profile)[**hawkfromhandsaw**](http://community.livejournal.com/hawkfromhandsaw/) madness challenge.

  
He jerked, felt his wrist snap. The blade twisted, catching the light and he was dazzled.

He heard whispers from the shadows and the lengthening sunbeams crept across the floor towards his feet. He had sat all night and now the dawn spilled across his path, bathing the room in flames.

Curious, how empty he felt. He thought that wasn't possible anymore; that he had emptied himself so long ago, so far away. The light touched his toes, sharp topography of scuffs and blacking drawing his eye like a magnet, a moonscape of tattered leather, bathed in ruby light.

He was numb, all sensation burnt away in the night. Had it been only one night? Two? Three hundred and sixty five nights times fifteen years?

Just one night?

His legs were lead stumps and he watched the sun finger the cuffs of his trousers.

One night spent in a mad frenzy, not believing that the threat was real, the trap already sprung around him in this very room. Fifteen years past, the morning sun had been ice white, cold as moonbeams. Lucy's face had been whiter still.

Another face burned into his brain like acid; Turpin's sneering, leering face.

He shuddered and his hand jerked again, the razor nicking into the ragged rattan chairseat. Not good, not good. His hand curled around the blade protectively. He'd have to hone it and strop it sharp once more, lest any nick in its pure surface spoil a perfect, unsullied slice.

Not that they deserved it. None of them.

Fleet street below was already beginning to clatter and steam; tac-tac-tac as a workman hammered closeby; toc-toc-toc as a cart passed under the window. They merged into the thump of hobnailed boots on the stairs as they dragged him away to darkness. He had counted the nights, not days, from sentencing to the moment he'd emerged into the brutal light of Sydney's harbour and a hell so vast he need never fear hell again.

The red dawn caught at his shins; the worn cloth shining like satin.

All that time, consumed in night, she had been gone. Gone. Dead. Well, she was better off, the angels knew that.

Johanna? The baby? Was her hair the same gold? Darker? Paler? Curly or straight? Fine as Chinese silk or heavy as bullion? He couldn't remember. He saw her as a pink and white appleblossom of a child, her curls a halo, wrought in her mother's hair on the canvas of his mind.

And Lucy, his Lucy, left to Turpin. Turpin, whose throat had been bare, a slate awaiting his mark. How delicately the skin would part, like lips begging for kisses, like her pale thighs.

His left eye twitched and the light crept to his knee.

Her name thrummed with his blood. That's how it had felt from the first moment he saw her; he, shy and bumbling, apt to trip over his own feet around girls. But she had smiled at him, and, bolder than brass, he'd asked to walk her home. Country life in a country town, where everyone knew each other, where bread was scare but smiles were plentiful.

He snorted. Such a fairytale. Life was impossible and rather than starve, they had upped and gone to London.

He smiled.

There was a certain comfort in the clutter and the dirt and the clanging of the church bells and work bells and factory bells and ship's bells, ringing, ringing, singing and ringing and his fist uncurled from its careful grip around the blade and again, the light caught at it, glittering waves in a sunstruck sea.

In the shop, Turpin's eyes had sparkled with lust, just like his own that one night. That first night he had called her his. There had been bells then, in a village church and bells on the grocer's cart that had borne them to the City.

He traced the razor's spine with one finger.

It had not taken many years and a hard school for him to know Turpin. He'd always understood but had trusted...he knew not what.

He sighed and stared until his eyes were red as the sky.

The mad possessive need for her had consumed him and her with it. Love did that if it burned too strong and the body so delicate, he mused. He had needed to have her, for all his proper courtship and vows. He started to laugh with the bells and the clatter and the din of waking humanity on its way to the grave. A few must pass this way.

He laughed at the sunlight poised where his prick lay huddled against his thigh.

Oh yes, how much did he understand what it felt like to hold her, to kiss her, to slide inside her and ring ring ring like the bells that pealed and sang and shivered?

Her face contorting beneath his lips, his words, soft and hushing. Only one moment, hold me love me want me as I want you.

Turpin's eyes, his own eyes, her eyes flashing in front of his face, reflected in the blade. His laughter stilled, but his smile grew.

Shadows whispered again and the light blazed into his lap, on his hands. Strong and clever, poised to the most acute of angles, able to take off one lone whisker with a shift of pressure. No flourishing movements and wastes of energy.

His smile reached his eyes. It must dance across the skin, a flick so light that the flesh cannot comprehend it is splitting until the next heartbeat.

Her heart beat against his, her arms gone from chaste and trusting to lures, pulling him closer; winding herself around him until he could bury himself and why could not little deaths have been true ones then, but she was wet and warm and her voice as soft as eiderdown.

Was she quite as soft for Turpin, terrified and stinking of the gin he'd poured down her throat?

His whole body jerked and the blade kissed his finger, just a shy peck. He watched it well and spill and the droplets spread on his white apron like cherries in snow.

Absently, he sucked on the small wound and tasted it carefully; thick and coppery, not unlike a few puddings he'd had in his time.

He was laughing again, finger in his mouth, pleased as an infant. Turpin would be back. He had no doubt the sailor boy was making a perfect nuisance of himself and that needle in the old hide was more than welcome. There was time and what could he do to a baby, his Johanna?

The sunlight bathed his face in vermilion, the reek of Signor Pirelli's cologne wafting faintly from the corner. If Turpin had claimed her virgin blood, what then?

He hissed at the sky, the cacophony outside deafening, his nostrils full of bay rum and rot.

No matter. The old goat would come under his hand and then the skies would open, the bells would ring and the heavens would welcome an arterial fountain, red as the dawn.

The light caught his eyes and he blinked, looking down to the floor.

He cocked his head to one side and watched the slow trickle from the corner, along the floorboards. Rain from his fantasies sluiced in crimson streams to bathe the city. Meanwhile, there was no need to be untidy, certainly not for the likes of Danny O'Higgins*.

He got the mop and pail and looked down at the chest, doing calculations in his head, humming.

"Mrs. Lovett?" he called down to her, a willing partner and an eminently sensible woman. Lucy had not been sensible in the least, poor thing.

"Yes, dearie?" Her voice was grating and blessedly normal.

The trunk knocked and bumped down the back stairs, leaving a most distressing trail until the mud in the alley obscured any trace to the bakehouse. Terribly inconvenient, that.

"Where's the axe?"

  
FIN

  
* in the stage production, Pirelli's real name is Danny O'Higgins. This was changed in the movie to Davey Collins.


End file.
